I’m teaching the intro mechanics course next term, starting on Monday, and my colleagues who just finished teaching it in the Winter term used WebAssign to handle most of the homework. They speak very highly of it, so I’m probably going to use it next term. I’m curious to know what other people think, though.… Continue reading Opinions on WebAssign?
Category: Education
Academic Poll Results: Drop It Like It’s Hot?
A few days ago I asked people’s opinions regarding drop deadlines for students who decide they no longer want to be in a class. As usual, I forgot a few qualifiers, and nobody used the categories I gave, but after sorting the answers into roughly the categories I gave, here are the results: A drop… Continue reading Academic Poll Results: Drop It Like It’s Hot?
Starting is the Hardest Part of Writing
The Female Science Professor had a nice post about working with someone who was afraid to write a paper: Out of desperation, I told the graphophobe to meet me at a particular cafe at a particular time, with the latest draft of the manuscript and whatever other notes or references he needed. We met, I… Continue reading Starting is the Hardest Part of Writing
Academic Poll: Breadth or Depth?
I fell behind on course reports from my modern physics class a few weeks back, but I do mean to get back to them, when I have more time. The material remaining is the end-of-term sprint through a bunch of topics in modern physics– three classes on atoms and molecules, three classes on solid state… Continue reading Academic Poll: Breadth or Depth?
Academic Poll: Drop It Like It’s Hot?
I handed in my final grades for the term this morning, and am now on “Spring Break” which is the misleading term for the week of frantic preparation for next term’s classes that our schedule allows. Here’s a poll question for you, though: We operate on ten-week “trimesters.” How late into the ten-week term should… Continue reading Academic Poll: Drop It Like It’s Hot?
Academic Poll: Amusing Anti-Cheating Strategies
The final exam for my modern physics class is this morning, which means I’ll have a bunch of time to kill while I proctor the test. This will likely involve a lot of brainless time-wasting, but I need to be on hand both as a formal guard against cheating, but more importantly to answer questions… Continue reading Academic Poll: Amusing Anti-Cheating Strategies
Contest: Stupidest Word Template?
I needed to generate an electronic recommendation letter for a former student yesterday, and printing the letter on paper and scanning the paper copy seemed a little too… 1998 to be worth doing. As a result, I spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling around with Microsoft Word to come up with a template that… Continue reading Contest: Stupidest Word Template?
Why Does Excel Suck So Much?
Yesterday’s bad graphic post spurred me to finally get around to doing the “Why Does Excel Suck So Much?” post I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I gripe about Excel a lot, as we’re more or less forced to use it for data analysis in the intro labs (students who have taken the… Continue reading Why Does Excel Suck So Much?
Class and College
Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau offers a provocative comment on class and higher education: Today (OK, yesterday, but I didn’t really sleep on the plane, so it’s still yesterday, or tomorrow is also today, or something) a friend offered (without necessarily endorsing) the theory that one reason why we try to get everyone to go… Continue reading Class and College
Watch Your Back, David Attenborough
One of my colleagues in biology just finished his Comparative Vertebrate anatomy course. For the final class projects, he has teams of students make little videos presenting the results of their research into some aspect of vertebrate anatomy. Such as, for example, this Sesame Street episode on flying snakes: The full set of videos are… Continue reading Watch Your Back, David Attenborough